Charles Sheffield(click on names to see more mathematical fiction
by the same author)

...

Contributed by
Michele Benzi

The story has to do with Babbage's
Analytical Engine and a remote region of Antarctica (the "Georgia"
of the title). The mathematics bit, aside from Babbage, consists
of a nonlinear optimization problem facing the main characters,
for the solution of which they contact "Gene", a numerical
analyst from Stanford, who was actually a real person (Gene
Golub, an eminent numerical analysts whom I knew very well and
co-authored four papers with). There is a brief discussion of
the computational complexity of the problem ("it's definitely
non-polynomial...").